Mikhail Gorbachev | Revered by some, hated by others

Two photos remind me of Mikhail Gorbachev. And they are not glorious.

Paule Robitaille
Member of Parliament and former journalist

The first dates from August 21, 1991, three days after a putsch which failed miserably. The President of the Soviet Union is seen looking haggard as he descends from an Aeroflot plane. The man next to him holds a Kalashnikov pointed downward. He is followed by the great love of his life, his wife, Raïssa, and their daughter, Irina, wrapped in a blanket, still asleep, flanked by bodyguards. Their holiday in Foros, Crimea, was cut short. The family was sequestered for 72 hours in the sumptuous Black Sea residence by a disjointed junta, made up, among others, of its vice-president and its interior and defense ministers. Seventy-two hours that forever change the destiny of the last president of the USSR.

When the photo is taken, Gorbachev does not yet realize what is happening.

That same evening and the day before, I am there, tens if not hundreds of thousands of euphoric people criss-cross the streets of Moscow and celebrate the victory of freedom over the regime which has suffocated them for 74 years. The spirit of freedom, out of its bottle, bewitches the empire.

Those who try in vain to put the toothpaste back in the tube and impose the Communist Party’s diktat again are ridiculed.

Independent radio, the fruit of Gorbachev’s glasnost, broadcasts live while state television and radio play the Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.

The people’s voice

I remember the happy unbolting of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the NKVK, ancestor of the KGB and the FSB. During these troubled hours, the army did not follow the putschists. She sides with the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, who, from the top of a tank surrounded by a jubilant crowd, swears that we will never go back. Politics abhors a vacuum, Gorbachev being sequestered, Boris Yeltsin steals the show. The President of the Russian Soviet Republic carries the voice of the people. The Soviet president finds himself completely overwhelmed by events.

The second image dates from August 23, 1991, two days later, and features Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev in front of the parliament of the Russian Republic. Yeltsin points to a vulnerable, gaping Gorbachev. He orders him to sign the decree putting an end to the reign of the Communist Party of Russia. Gorbachev, brought back to reality, runs, humiliated. The next day, the Russian government takes control of all Communist Party buildings.

Gorbachev tries to save the furniture, but it is too late. He will have lost all credibility. Four months later, very close to Minsk, in Belarus, the presidents of Ukraine, Leonid Kravtchouk, of Belarus, Stanislav Chouchkievich, and of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, sign a treaty which ratifies the dislocation of the Soviet Union . On December 25, Mikhail Gorbachev terminated his functions as President of the USSR. The end of the USSR follows. According to Vladimir Putin, it was the greatest disaster of the 20th century.^e century.

A weak man

I arrived in the former USSR in September 1990. During all those months that preceded the end of the Soviet empire, the image of Mikhail Gorbachev was that of a weak man. His major economic reforms were catastrophic. He was ridiculed. It was the time of empty stores and endless queues. The Soviet republics, in turn, challenged his authority and backed their independence with a referendum. In January 1991, I was in Vilnius, Lithuania. The leaders had declared independence. Gorbachev had sent the Soviet army to repress the population, but after the death of 14 people crushed by the tanks, he had ordered his troops to return to the fold. I saw the biggest gathering of my life; a crowd of a million people who attended the funeral of the victims and I told myself that Gorbachev would never be able to stop this freedom movement which was spreading throughout the empire.

Throughout his reign, Gorbachev desperately tried to balance himself like a tightrope walker, buffeted by the wind at tens of meters in height.

Mikhail Gorbachev, this peasant grandson, was the product of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was not a great Vaclav Havel-style democratic visionary. He was resolutely communist. He inherited a bankrupt empire, weakened by a war in Afghanistan that was going nowhere, crippled by a planned economy that had become a heresy, unable to keep pace with a cold war that the Americans dominated. He will have had the courage not to put his head in the sand and to attempt economic reforms, the perestroikaand an openness to the world, the glasnost. Gorbachev’s mistake was to believe that communism could be something else, that it could be reformed.

A mistake for some, but a brilliant coup for others, you might say. He freed the genie from the bottle and there followed a beneficial liberation for millions of Europeans, the reunification of Germany, the denuclearization of the two superpowers. He will have been a hero in spite of himself.

The war in Ukraine is the direct consequence of these forces that he liberated. And it’s as if 31 years later, the day of his death, we’re back to where we started. This conflict is the collision of these two worlds; who worships him and who hates him.